Bald Eagle Got Off to a Bad Start : Conservation: Young bird released to the wild found pickings were good in barnyards--much too good, in fact.

A young bald eagle that turned chicken hawk after he was released in the wild is back in captivity.

State ornithologist Jim D. Wilson recommended a short stay behind bars for the wayward eagle, but plans to give him a second chance at freedom.

The eagle, known as “E,” was released at the Schell-Osage Wildlife Area in west-central Missouri in July as part of a Department of Conservation program to re-establish a breeding population of eagles in the state.

Seventy-four young bald eagles were raised in artificial nests with only minimal human contact and released into the wilds of Missouri under a 10-year program which just ended.

“E,” came from a wild nest in Wisconsin. He began doing un-eaglelike things after he or she--it’s difficult to determine the sex of an eagle--arrived in Missouri.

Although most eagles shy away from humans, “E” didn’t mind them at all. A Daviess County farm family watched in amazement as he killed and ate their tame ducks one by one.

Wildlife officials thought the bird had only momentarily deviated from its proper prey, mainly rodents. So they recaptured “E” and released it again, about 75 miles away, in Squaw Creek Wildlife Refuge in northwestern Missouri.

“E” turned up in late August in southern Iowa, eating dead piglets at another farm. Captured again and returned to Squaw Creek, he was caught red-taloned a few days later feasting on chicken at a farm in Atchison County.

This time “E” was transferred to the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, which specializes in the care of injured birds of prey.

Hundreds of bald eagles winter around major lakes and rivers in Missouri, and Wilson plans to rerelease “E” near his cousins in February, in hope that he will learn proper eagle behavior.

“What apparently happened to this bird is it somehow found out that farmyards were a place you could find some easy pickings,” Wilson said.

“I’d like to give it one more try. I’ll release it with another flock of eagles at a wildlife area where it won’t come in contact with humans very easily, and where there is an abundant natural food supply.

“If it doesn’t adapt to the wild, it will be a zoo bird. I don’t really want that; nobody does. There are plenty of zoo eagles.”

Of the 74 eagles the conservation department has released in the state, only one other behaved in a similar fashion, Wilson said. That eagle was killed by a truck in Kansas while eating from the carcass of a dead animal in the road (scavenging also is uncharacteristic of eagles).

Overall, the efforts to get eagles to nest again in Missouri are beginning to pay off, Wilson said. Three pairs nested near the Mingo National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Missouri this year, and another pair nested at an undisclosed location in central Missouri.

The eagles are equipped with colored wing tags. More than 40 of the eagles released at the Mingo and Schell-Osage wildlife areas have been observed in surrounding states and as far away as Texas and Colorado.

It takes about five years for an eagle to reach maturity and be ready to nest.

“They are similar to salmon, in that they should return to where they were raised to raise their own young,” Wilson said.

Eagles began disappearing from the state as large numbers of settlers arrived, around the turn of the century.

Wilson said that the habitat may be better for eagles in Missouri now than ever before.

“For one thing, the eagle is now protected by law and people know it, so there’s less disturbance of them,” he said. “In addition, eagles are water birds and like our abundant reservoirs.”